The game needs a proofreader, let's start with that. Immediately once I gain control of my character, first person I talk to, tells me they live in the "yelloh" house. Characters will say things like "Wel wel wel," there's a grocery store called the "super marketing," just a lot of mistakes that are really easy to spot and fix. Outsourcing this stuff to your patrons/playtesters makes the project look amateurish, especially since this isn't the first release so theoretically there was time for many of these to be spotted and fixed already.
The game also has a lot of gameplay problems. Related to the typos, character event hints on your phone are signposted by times. The in-game clock uses a 24 hour clock, but the hints sometimes do and sometimes don't. Sometimes a hint will tell you to be at a place at 6 PM to see an event and mean 6 PM. Sometimes it'll say 6 PM but mean 6 AM. Sometimes it'll say to show up somewhere at 19 PM. It's all over the place. I think only one hint for the morning actually said AM, all the others were hinted as "6 PM" or "7 PM" or whatever. The combat system is a single-player turn-based battle with action command inputs, where you move left and right to dodge attacks and hit the attack button at the right time to deal more damage. This kind of leads to it feeling a lot less like a turn-based RPG and a lot more like a very slow action game, kind of receiving the worst of both worlds. Other action-command heavy games like the Mario RPG games make this feel a bit more RPG like by giving you a whole party, but here it kinda just lacks the tactical feel of RPG combat and instead feels like an RPG trying and failing to play like an action game.
The game also lacks signposting. I frequently found myself wandering around confused on what to do or where to go next. Outside of the relationship events hinted on the phone there were still other story events that I'd occasionally stumble upon, but had no idea I was going to find them in my wanderings. A simple quest system, or, like, a class schedule for the school, or just characters telling you where and when things happen, anything like that would help keep this game from just being tons of frustrated wandering. Also, as mentioned before the game has a time system. The time does not pass automatically, only when you trigger an event. So I would regularly wander around looking for events to trigger to pass the time and if I couldn't find one I'd just go to sleep. Well, I say "only when you trigger an event" but it turns out that is wrong. You can also pass time by using the bus or by sitting on the couch in the living room, but the game doesn't tell you either of those things so I didn't realize until I'd already been wandering around for half an hour trying and failing to find events to use to pass the time so I could get to the evening relationship events in my phone. No signposting. No tutorial. No instruction. Tutorials and signposting can be and frequently are overdone, but the solution is never to just not include them.
So gameplay bad, writing... not bad but amateurish. What's good? The art I guess. It was what kept me going right up until I left the house at night and upon leaving immediately triggered a game-breaking bug. Unfortunately the game's auto-save triggers upon entering a new zone so my autosave became just load game, game crashes. I hadn't manual saved for about half an hour at that point and decided the game was just too frustrating to keep trying. This review is for version 0.52 of the game. Hopefully later updates will polish some of these problems because right now the game is a real mess, which is a shame because the art looks appealing.
The game also has a lot of gameplay problems. Related to the typos, character event hints on your phone are signposted by times. The in-game clock uses a 24 hour clock, but the hints sometimes do and sometimes don't. Sometimes a hint will tell you to be at a place at 6 PM to see an event and mean 6 PM. Sometimes it'll say 6 PM but mean 6 AM. Sometimes it'll say to show up somewhere at 19 PM. It's all over the place. I think only one hint for the morning actually said AM, all the others were hinted as "6 PM" or "7 PM" or whatever. The combat system is a single-player turn-based battle with action command inputs, where you move left and right to dodge attacks and hit the attack button at the right time to deal more damage. This kind of leads to it feeling a lot less like a turn-based RPG and a lot more like a very slow action game, kind of receiving the worst of both worlds. Other action-command heavy games like the Mario RPG games make this feel a bit more RPG like by giving you a whole party, but here it kinda just lacks the tactical feel of RPG combat and instead feels like an RPG trying and failing to play like an action game.
The game also lacks signposting. I frequently found myself wandering around confused on what to do or where to go next. Outside of the relationship events hinted on the phone there were still other story events that I'd occasionally stumble upon, but had no idea I was going to find them in my wanderings. A simple quest system, or, like, a class schedule for the school, or just characters telling you where and when things happen, anything like that would help keep this game from just being tons of frustrated wandering. Also, as mentioned before the game has a time system. The time does not pass automatically, only when you trigger an event. So I would regularly wander around looking for events to trigger to pass the time and if I couldn't find one I'd just go to sleep. Well, I say "only when you trigger an event" but it turns out that is wrong. You can also pass time by using the bus or by sitting on the couch in the living room, but the game doesn't tell you either of those things so I didn't realize until I'd already been wandering around for half an hour trying and failing to find events to use to pass the time so I could get to the evening relationship events in my phone. No signposting. No tutorial. No instruction. Tutorials and signposting can be and frequently are overdone, but the solution is never to just not include them.
So gameplay bad, writing... not bad but amateurish. What's good? The art I guess. It was what kept me going right up until I left the house at night and upon leaving immediately triggered a game-breaking bug. Unfortunately the game's auto-save triggers upon entering a new zone so my autosave became just load game, game crashes. I hadn't manual saved for about half an hour at that point and decided the game was just too frustrating to keep trying. This review is for version 0.52 of the game. Hopefully later updates will polish some of these problems because right now the game is a real mess, which is a shame because the art looks appealing.